Nana Asfour

For “Float,” her first solo show at Paula Cooper, Tauba Auerbach continued to pursue a demure minimalism while touching on the mechanics of color and the vagaries of perception. While her exhibition, which included paintings, sculptures and installations from 2012, was short on big sparks, it was absorbing in its conceptual rigor and mind-bending optical dexterity... Read more

Bringing venerable artists such as Jonas Mekas and Alison Knowles to a younger audience has become something of a modus operandi for the Lower East Side gallery James Fuentes. Continuing in this vein, Fuentes recently presented an arresting exhibition of sculpture by Bill Walton (1931-2010), concurrent with a second Walton show at JTT, a new gallery in the same neighborhood... Read more

In a 2009 interview with Cecily Brown in Bomb magazine, Jacqueline Humphries articulated her aspirations: "Postmodernism is supposed to be all about appropriation and cynicism; about adopting an attitude more suited to being intellectually advanced," she said... Read more

Ellen Berkenblit's 20 large, graceful, boisterous paintings-with deep dramatic palettes-exhibited impressive painterly mettle. The cartoonish figure that has starred in many of the artist's fantastical creations for over a decade has metamorphosed. The sweet introvert with roundish features and a bulbous nose has become a slightly mischievous extrovert with an angular face, pointy nose and thick lashes. She likes ribbons, this one, and loves to frolic... Read more

When recently asked what draws him to painting, Henry Taylor told the New York Observer: "It's like having a carton of milk in the fridge; it's just gonna happen." That compulsion and the L.A.-based artist's infectious energy abounded in his eight-room retrospective, which included more than 70 paintings and sculptures, most made in the last decade... Read more

Anna Molska (b. 1983), one of the younger members of a new generation of Polish artists, recently mounted an installation of two intriguing works concerning evil and death. In a semidocumentary video, The Mourners (approx. 28 minutes, 2010), seven women, mostly in beige parkas, gather in a barren greenhouse overlooking a blindingly white, snow-covered field, and sing traditional Polish funeral songs. In between, they chat, dance, laugh, cry and tell personal stories of loss and Satan—in whom they wholeheartedly believe... Read more

For his second solo show at this compact gallery, Paul Bloodgood displayed, alongside some of his paintings (dates ranged from 2008 to 2011), the collages that have for many years served him as source material. It was a smart move. Made by dicing images—his own or those of Pollock, CeÌzanne and Ming dynasty artist Tung Ch’i-ch’ang—and then reassembling the parts in an ill-fitting jigsaw, the collages (approx. 12 by 10 inches) reveal the intricate interplays that inspire repeated motifs in his canvases, such as craggy lines and amorphous color blocks... Read more

The spring art season in Berlin lacks an important component: Galerie Ben Kaufmann. The gallery represented international artists Matthias Dornfeld, Bernd Ribbeck and Florian Morlat, among others. Reached by e-mail, the 39-year-old Kaufmann told A.i.A. that keeping up with the gallery's demands had become too daunting. "Nearly one year ago, I was in Mexico City for business reasons; after that I was installing a show in Paris and was due for an appointment in L.A. It was too much, I needed a change," he said. "Our time at the gallery was great, but I always knew that I would need to get out of the art business one day.".. Read more

For Performa 11, Berlin-based artist Jonathan Meese held his own one-man protest in his own solo show in Chelsea. Meese's timely "occupation" of the Bortolami gallery was a mad, sake-fuelled rant whose purpose was to shock his bourgeois art-world audience... Read more